Nick did not look at her. Mae touched the mark beneath her shirt.
“We do it because we can,” Nick went on. “Because what we want is more important than someone else’s life.”
“Oh, but you’re not like that,” Jamie told him anxiously, and offered him a real smile.
Nick did not take it. “Yes, I am.”
“Maybe you used to be,” Jamie argued. “But it doesn’t—it’s not the same. It was in another life, almost.”
“No,” said Nick.
He stopped abruptly and then headed in a different direction, toward the war memorial sculpture in the middle of the gardens. Nick slung himself down at the foot of the plinth, long legs stretched down the two steps, and Jamie sat down cross-legged on one of the surrounding stone slabs.
Mae stayed standing. She’d always liked the top of the memorial best, the iron woman straining desperately toward the dome of the sky.
“Alan’s family lives up in Durham,” Nick said, staring down at his hands. “He has an aunt and an uncle there, he’s got cousins, and I went up there before and scared his aunt pretty badly. But Alan wanted to go back. He thought that he could—that they could get used to me. He thought it was time to stop lying and have a family. So we moved to Durham and got a flat, and we turned up on Natasha Walsh’s doorstep. She said that she never wanted to see either of us again.”
“Poor Alan,” said Jamie, his eyes huge. “I’m so sorry.”
Nick’s mouth twisted. “Yeah,” he said. “Anyone who wasn’t a monster would be sorry, wouldn’t they? D’you want to know how I felt when I heard her say that? When I saw the look on his face?”
He laughed, and the sound cut through the air. Jamie flinched.
Nick spat out the words: “I was so glad. I didn’t want anyone else to have their mark on him. I don’t want anyone to have a claim on him but me.”
He reached into his pocket and took out his magic knife, drawing his fingers over the markings that meant it could cut anything in the world, and flipped it over his fingers. Mae could actually hear the low whine as it sliced through the air, like a hungry animal.
“But he was so unhappy,” Nick said. “And I wanted … I wanted to give him something. So I broke into his aunt’s house.”
Jamie made a small, horrified sound.
Nick continued, his voice level. “I came creeping in through the window at night, and I put my mark on them. All of them. Even the children. And I made them love him. I thought someone should. I got them to come back and say they were so sorry. Alan was—he was really glad. It took him a few days to work it out.”
Nick fell silent. Mae looked at the ground, at the laces of Jamie’s shoes, and tried not to think of how Alan must have felt when he did work it out.
He’d created the demon who could do that, who had brought human hearts to lay at his feet like a cat bringing its owner dead mice.
She could imagine what had happened after, the storm that had killed those two people, Alan and Nick both screaming until Alan’s phone rang with her on the other end of the line. Now she knew why Nick was scared and Alan was ready to betray him.
“It wasn’t fair,” Jamie said, hesitating. “That they wouldn’t see Alan.”
“It wasn’t fair,” said Mae. “But that doesn’t make you right.”
Nick looked up at her then, and she was shocked by the stripped-down look on his face, blank as if every time she’d seen his face blank before, she’d been seeing a mask. This was his real face, and it was empty.
It might have been despair. Or he might not have been feeling anything at all.
“Did you ever think,” Mae asked, her voice thin and small in the middle of this lush summer garden, staring into the demon’s eyes,“that if Alan didn’t love you anymore, you could always make him?”
Nick’s face stayed blank, as clean of expression as a skull, but past the memorial for the dead and above the summer leaves, there was suddenly a tree of lightning painted in silent fiery brushstrokes against the sky
“
“I didn’t think so,” Mae told him. “So that’s the first step. Keep climbing.”
Her phone rang. She grabbed it and saw that it was Sin calling.
“Excuse me, I have to—” she said, and sprinted off toward the trees.
She could see her whole city laid out before her as Sin’s voice came rich and clear into her ear.
“I’ve got your army,” she said. “You sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Yeah,” Mae told her. “Yeah, I’m sure.” She laughed, her hand tight at the back of her neck. “It’s good to—I’m glad to hear that. I could use some good news today.”
“Two sixteen-year-old girls leading an army is good news?” Sin asked.
“Think about it this way,” said Mae. “Joan of Arc was fourteen. Compared to her, we’re kind of underachievers. Plus, I’m seventeen.”
“Oh, in that case we’d better get on this before you’re over the hill.”
Sin laughed, the sound wild and a little reckless, the same way Mae felt, so glad to be doing something after feeling helpless for so long. Mae looked over to Nick sitting with his head still bowed at the foot of the statue, and
